WTF

News of Carlos Tevez perhaps becoming the highest paid footballer on the planet by earning nearly $40 million with Shanghai Shenhua ($1.25 per second) was unfathomable. That kind of total, when dissected and attempted to be understood, is like standing on the beach and trying to fathom all the individual grains of sand or staring up at the night sky and quantifying your place in the universe. 

The FA, in its infinite wisdom, has decided there needs to be more girls playing the beautiful game in England. This in and of itself is a reasonable thing to want. Gender equality is good and the FA should want that. 

What is not reasonable or good is the document they made full of suggestions on how to get more females playing soccer.

Specifically, these suggestions were clearly not written by women, or girls, or anyone who has ever met a woman or girl.

Football is a harsh business, particularly so for managers. Sometimes, simply winning matches isn’t enough to placate fickle supporters and owners. With exorbitant amounts of money being pumped into the game, the business of hiring and firing managers is a particularly trigger-happy one. 

With clubs only a loss away from entering crisis mode, the decisions made are occasionally downright stupid. In modern football, at the risk of sounding old, the men in charge aren't given enough time to succeed.

Here are 10 managerial sackings that history will not look kindly upon.

Every year, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales issues a plea to the website's users to donate to the nonprofit, ensuring that it maintains its independence, remains ad free and continues to perform optimally. However, according to The Washington Post, the nonprofits’s appeals have been so effective over the years that the website has tens of millions of dollars sitting in reserve. 

Saturday’s match between Bundesliga leaders RB Leipzig and relegation-threatened FC Ingolstadt was remarkable in that the team at the bottom pulled off a highly improbable 1-0 upset. 

What was exceedingly exceptional was what transpired in second half stoppage time. Referee Markus Schmidt, who’d apparently just put down Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince before running out to officiate this match, showed that it is indeed safer to be feared than loved.

It simply doesn’t get any more embarrassing or unprofessional than this. Trailing Sheffield Wednesday 2-1 in the English Championship on Saturday, Preston had both their strikers sent off in the final minutes after nearly coming to blows and being separated by teammates.

Eoin Doyle had halved the Preston deficit in the 82nd minute, but he and strike partner Jermaine Beckford were subsequently shown straight reds for violent conduct in the 90th minute. 

When I was a young lad my youth soccer team had a throw-in routine that we labelled “Pikachu”, much to the embarrassment of our coach. The player taking the throw-in would gleefully scream out the play over and over, and we’d get giddy as all hell at the opportunity to execute. Standing in a well-organized line four or five deep, the players towards the front would peel off laterally while the player at the very back of the queue would steam forward to collect the throw-in. 

Carolina Portaluppi has almost 500,000 followers on Instagram and is the daughter of Gremio coach Renato Gaucho. For these reasons, cameras were unfairly turned on her during the final stages of Gremio’s 2-0 aggregate victory over Cruzeiro in the Brazilian Cup semifinals.